Snobs: A Novel

by Julian Fellowes

  'And I suppose there's no news. About… everything…'

  'No.'

  'Oh, darling.' However irritated, Edith did feel sorry for her mother. She was forced to concede that Mrs Lavery, shallow as her values might be, was experiencing some perfectly genuine emotions. Particularly regret. 'You won't take any… step you might be sorry about, will you?'

  'What step?'

  'I mean… you won't burn your bridges until you're sure…'

  Edith was used to her mother's seemingly limitless supply of clichés so she needed no translator to tell her what they were discussing. Oddly, despite the paucity of her mother's vocabulary, the question had succeeded in centring her thoughts on the matter. As she brought the conversation to an end and cleared the line, she knew the time had come for positive action.

  It was a Saturday, a mild, pleasant day for them as a rule, involving newspapers, a lunch out somewhere, perhaps a cinema or possibly a dinner with some friends in a Wandsworth kitchen but as Edith dressed she knew that no such day lay ahead for her. She selected her outfit with considerable care, casual country clothes, well bred, unshowy, exactly the type of skirt and jersey that she had renounced with a religious fervour so short a time ago. Just as when she was choosing her clothes for the dress show, she was once more conscious that her two lives demanded two costumes. A duke's daughter might get away with wearing some streetwalker's outfit from Voyage at a dinner in Shropshire, indeed she would be praised for her aristocratic eccentricity but she, Edith, would never be given the same licence. Had she dared to wear London clothes in the country, to Charles's circle it would only have been a confirmation of her ill-breeding. When she entered the kitchen, Simon looked up in surprise. 'My word. You look as if you're auditioning for Hay Fever.'

  'I feel such a fool. I promised to take my mother to a lunch party today and I completely forgot about it. That's why she rang. Can you forgive me?'

  'Whose lunch party?'

  'Just some country cousins.'

  'You don't have any country cousins. Wasn't that the whole point?' In saying this, Simon showed one of his rare flashes of understanding. It was exactly the point.

  'I do but I never talk about them. They're too boring to live.'

  'Which means you don't want me to come.' Simon hated to be left out of anything. Or at least, if he was, it had to be his choice. He didn't mind being too busy to join in, in fact he quite enjoyed it, but the thought that people were not anxious for his company — even if it was for a journey to the post box — was anathema to him.

  Edith smiled a wistful, wouldn't-that-be-nice smile. 'I wish. But she's been begging me for us to have some time on our own. I suppose she wants to talk about everything.' This was accompanied by a half-shrug that brooked no argument.

  'Just be nice about me.'

  She gave him a warm and supportive smile, knowing that in her heart she was plotting his fall, and set off downstairs to their bedroom to collect her coat. She did not want to tell Simon where she was going as that would have detonated a scene and she was by no means certain of the day's possible outcome. The last thing she wanted was for him to flounce back to his wife in a pet, leaving her to come home to an empty flat.

  The truth was she had determined, in that morning moment of surveying her own floating sick, that she was not going to be put off for one day longer. She would drive that very morning to Broughton and beard the lion — or rather the lioness's cub

  — in his den. As she sped out down the A22, she couldn't really understand what had taken her so long to come to this decision. This was her husband and she was going to what was, after all, her marital home. No one could argue with that.

  An unpleasant surprise was waiting for her, as she had forgotten that on a Saturday in summer the house would of course be open to the public. Somehow that had slipped through her calculations and she was now in the faintly ludicrous position of having to choose between parking her car in the courtyard and going in through the family's entrance or entering by the public door and travelling up into the body of the house surrounded by tourists and housewives from Brighton. She made the bold decision to go in by the latter route. She thought there would be plenty of time to block her path if she rang the family's doorbell and she was gambling on Charles being in his own study, which was next to the library. It would be the work of a moment to slip through the cordon and open the door and she correctly guessed that none of the guides would stop her.

  Indeed, she made a point of pausing to say hello to the pleasant woman in a stout, country suit who stood taking tickets.

  'Hello, Mrs Curley, how are you? Can I creep in this way? Would you mind?' Edith had mastered this particular trick of her husband's people, that of asking as a favour something that cannot be refused. 'Oh, Mrs So-and-so, could you bear to wait up until we get home? Would that be a terrible bore for you?' Of course, the wretched woman being instructed in this way (as well as her employer) knows that this really means 'You are forbidden to go to bed until I have returned' but it is of course a more self-congratulatory way to deliver a command. It is all part of the aristocracy's consciously created image. They like to pride themselves on being 'marvellous with servants', which usually means making impossible demands in the friendliest voice imaginable.

  Mrs Curley was clearly uncomfortable with the request but as Edith had predicted, there was nothing she could do about it. 'Of course, mi-lady,' she said with a cheerful nod, and dialled the family's private number the minute Edith had passed by.

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  Charles Broughton was indeed in his study or, as Lady Uckfield liked to call it, the Little Library, just as Edith suspected. He was answering letters in a vague sort of way, pretending to be, rather than actually being, busy. The house party was of his mother's choosing and, as always, those friends she had selected for him were not congenial to his wounded soul. Diana Bohun he found cold and too self-consciously grand to be of interest while her husband was very nearly mad. Clarissa was not among them. He had at least managed to persuade his mother that she was barking up the wrong tree there but… if not Clarissa then who?

  He knew about Edith's appearance at Tommy Wainwright's. Indeed Tommy had told him the following day, perhaps not wanting to have someone else deliver the news. At first Charles had been extremely angry, not with Tommy but with his mother. On the evening in question she had suddenly made him take her to visit some ancient friend in hospital, a mission that was represented to him as crucial but was of course, as he could see now, the simplest ploy to keep him from the Wainwright party. But then, after he had calmed down a little, he wondered for the thousandth time what would have been achieved by their meeting. Whatever his friends might say about the strangeness of her actions, he did understand why Edith had left him.

  He was dull. He knew this was true because, alas for him, he was just clever enough to be aware of it. He knew he was no company for her once the joy of her advancement had worn off. Half the time, if he was honest, he didn't really know what his wife was talking about. When she questioned the policy of the Opposition or tried to evaluate the benefits and harm of intervening in the Middle East… Charles knew there were differing points of view on these subjects but he didn't see why he was called upon to have them. So long as he kept voting Conservative and saying how frightful he thought New Labour, wasn't that enough? It was all and more than most of his pals in White's expected of him. Well, clearly it wasn't enough for Edith. Now even he had begun to suspect that she might conceivably want him back — or at least that she wanted to talk about it — but had anything changed? Wouldn't she tire of him again within a matter of months, if not weeks? Wouldn't it be better for her and for him if they knew when they were beaten? This in short was how he had begun to think of his marriage. A defeat certainly but a defeat that should now be faced up to and walked away from. Which was of course precisely what Lady Uckfield had intended. It is customary these days to suggest that all interference in the private lives of one's chil
dren invariably leads to disappointment but this is not true. Clever parents, who do not play their game too fast, can achieve their aims. And the Marchioness of Uckfield was cleverer than most.

  He looked up as the door opened and the sedate figure of the Viscountess Bohun slid into the room. 'Charles?' she said with a despairing roll of her eyes. 'Thank God you're here.'

  'Why? What is it?'

  'I'm in the most frightful fix. Peter's gone for a walk and we haven't got the car with us. Anyway…' Charles waited patiently. 'The thing is…' Diana moistened her lip nervously. She was really quite a talented actress. 'I've made a sort of muddle of the dates and I've come without anything…'

  Charles looked at her, puzzled. This made no sense at all, like a piece translated badly from a foreign tongue. 'I'm so sorry,' he said in answer to Diana's pseudo-blushes, 'I'm not sure I…'

  Diana overcame her revulsion for this sort of tactic. Desperate times breed desperate measures and as her hostess had made clear, these were desperate times. 'I wasn't expecting it but… it's that time of the month and I've got to get to a chemist…'

  'Oh, Lord.' Charles leaped to his feet in a frenzy of embarrassment. 'Of course. What can I do?'

  Diana breathed more easily. She had reached her goal and wonderfully quickly. 'Could you bear to run me into Lewes, only everything in the country shuts at one and—'

  'Certainly. Right away.'

  'I've just got to tell your mother something.'

  Lavery fetched the food and removed the plates and made elaborately courteous remarks all evening. She had that uniquely English talent of demonstrating, through her scrupulously polite manner, just how awful she thought the company. She could leave a roomful crushed and rejected and yet congratulate herself on behaving perfectly. It is of course of all forms of rudeness the most offensive as it leaves no room for rebuttal. Even at the height of hostility the Moral High Ground is never abandoned.

  Edith watched the three familiar faces and tried to question herself as to what was really taking place. Was this the cementing of a new alliance that would shape her future life? Would these three people be her companions through twenty Christmases to come? Would Simon and her mother build their bridges and talk about the children and come to share private jokes? Handsome as Simon was and strong as her desire for him remained, she was struck this evening by the dreariness of them all.

  She had lived the last two years in the front rank of English life and on reflection she was surprised to discover how normal it had become for her to do so — until, that is, she had removed herself from it. While she had been at Broughton she had been oppressed by the lack of event, by the emptiness of her daily round. Now that she had left it, however, hardly a day passed when at least one of her acquaintance from her life with Charles was not in the newspaper. And when she thought about it, having at the time complained ceaselessly that they never did anything, she remembered dinner after dinner where she had sat opposite some faintly famous face from the Cabinet or the opera or simply the gossip columns. Bored to sobs as she was by Googie and Tigger, she had become used to hearing political and Royal chat days or even weeks before it hit the headlines. She was accustomed to knowing the details of the private lives of the great before they became common knowledge — if indeed they ever did. She and Charles had not spent a great deal of time staying away but now her memory reminded her of three or four shooting parties during the winter and a couple of house parties in the summer. She knew Blenheim by this time and Houghton and Arundel and Scone. She had lost the sense of these places' historicity. They had become the homes of her circle. In this she was almost being honest — as honest certainly as those born to the class to which she had so briefly belonged. Edith had learned well all the tricks of aristocratic irreverence. She would stride like the best of them into a dazzling great hall by Vanbrugh, lined with full length van Dycks, and curse the M25 as she threw her handbag into a Hepplewhite chair. By this stage, she understood how to make that statement of solidarity. 'This wonderful room is ordinary to me,' their actions say, 'because it is my natural habitat. I belong here even if you do not.'

  Now, it seemed to her, looking at Kenneth and Stella with their framed flower prints from Peter Jones, their pseudo-Regency furniture, their Jane Churchill print curtains, that her membership of that club where she could curl up in an armchair in the long library at Wilton and leaf through Vogue, hugging a vodka and tonic, had been revoked without reference to her. In a rare moment of clarity she understood that in choosing this actor, far from making a wild bohemian statement, she had in fact returned to her own country. That Simon was far more of a piece with Stella and her faraway baronet cousin or Kenneth and his business friends than Charles had ever been. This world, where, as a general rule, one laughed and cried alongside the obscure — this was her real world. The world in which she had grown up and where she would now again live. Charles and Broughton and the Name Exchange only touched her people tangentially. They were, whatever her mother might like to think, an entirely different tribe.

  'Phew!' said Simon, as they pulled away from the curb and headed back towards the King's Road. Edith nodded. They had survived. That was the main thing. She had taken the first step in explaining to her mother that her dream-life was over.

  Simon winked at her. 'We're alive,' he said. For a moment they rode on in silence. 'Do you want to go straight home?'

  'As opposed to?'

  'Well, we could go on somewhere.'

  'Where?'

  Simon made a slight pout. 'What about Annabel's?'

  Edith was rather surprised. 'Are you a member?'

  He shook his head, a little petulantly, she thought. 'No, of course I'm not. But you can get us in.'

  Edith wasn't at all sure that she could get them in. Charles was the member, after all, and although they had been together fairly frequently and they certainly knew her at the club she wasn't clear as to where that left her. Nor was she convinced that it was a good idea. There were bound to be people there from Charles's set. 'I don't know,' she said.

  'Come on. Charles is in Sussex and you can't run away from being seen all the time. We've got our life, too, I suppose.'

  This time, unlike her excursions with Charles, they parked in the square and walked to the entrance steps. Simon had only been once before and was grinning like a madman as they descended. Edith was less certain of herself and the moment they had entered the corridor hall she knew she had been right. This was a Mistake. The club servant in charge greeted her affably enough. 'Lady Broughton,' he paused to take in Simon, 'are you meeting someone? Can I tell them you're here?'

  Edith felt herself blushing. 'Well, we're not actually. I just wondered if we could come in for a moment.'

  Again the answer was scrupulously polite. 'I didn't know you were a member, milady.'

  'Well, I'm not. I mean, Charles — Lord Broughton — is and I just thought…' She tailed off in the face of the regretful smile on the face of the attendant.

  'I'm very sorry, milady…'

  If fate had been kind that would have been it but at that precise moment the door pushed open and with a sinking heart Edith heard the shrill tones of Jane Cumnor. Turning, she smiled straight into the huge, sweating face of Henry as he lumbered in, puffing with the effort of clambering down the basement steps. For a fraction of a second Jane was silent as she took in Edith and, of course, Simon. Then her smile returned.

  'Edith! How lovely!' She kissed her coldly on both cheeks. 'Aren't you going to introduce us?'

  'Simon Russell. Lord and Lady Cumnor.' She didn't really know why she hadn't used their Christian names. Could it be that she felt the need to impress Simon? After the evening they had just spent?

  Jane gave her a slightly old-fashioned look. 'Are you coming in?'

  For a moment Edith was going to say that they were in fact leaving when Simon spoke. 'They won't let us. Apparently you have to be a full member.' He didn't really understand the enormity of his betrayal of Edi
th in this. He simply wanted to get inside the club and so far as he could see, here were two people who could manage it for them.

  But Henry was not to be caught. Sensing what was coming he nodded briskly. 'Edith,' he said, and strode on past her down the corridor towards the bar.

  Jane smiled wanly. 'What a bore for you,' she murmured. 'I'm not a member either. I, um, I suppose I could go after Henry if you want…' She tailed away to demonstrate how very much she did not wish to carry out her own suggestion and Edith let her go.

  'No, no,' she said. 'It couldn't matter less. We're late anyway. I don't know why we looked in.' She kissed Jane perfunctorily with Simon twinkling away by her side, still hoping to be taken in and still missing what was going on. And then they were alone again. The attendant, ever impeccably polite, was anxious to bring about a satisfactory conclusion. 'I am sorry, Lady Broughton…'

  Edith nodded. 'We're just off,' she said.

  They were outside the door and at the bottom of the steps when a voice hailed them from above. 'Edith?' They looked up and there was the lanky figure of Tommy Wainwright descending towards them. 'Fancy meeting you.' He smiled affably enough and shook Simon's hand. His wife, Arabella, a cooler customer entirely than her husband, was silent. 'Are you going already?' said Tommy. 'Yes,' said Edith. But before she could stop him Simon was having another shot at completing his evening in the way he had planned.

  'Edith thought she could get us in but she can't,' he said, thereby giving Arabella Wainwright a funny story and a parable of Edith's fall all in one phrase.

  Tommy smiled. 'Then you must let me.'

  'Really, it doesn't matter,' protested Edith.

  'Come on,' said Simon.

  Arabella murmured gently, 'If she doesn't want to…' It was quite clear that she was no more anxious than Jane Cumnor to be seen escorting Edith Broughton and her new lover into Annabel's but Tommy was made of stouter stuff. A few minutes later he had equipped them all with drinks and they were seated at the foot of a giant Buddha in the little red smoking room to one side of the bar. Simon saw Arabella as a challenge and they had hardly sat down before he was inviting her to dance.